Saturday, January 02, 2010

A kitchen light, an off-color floorboard.A bra dangling from a Japanese folding screen.It’s spring again, I’m twenty-three again;I ache and feel wonder again.The strains of Schubert from the morning radiocarve grooves too deep to be smoothed.Three apartment buildings outside your windowclimb skyward in a cubist frenzyas a frieze of eighth notes descendlike stoplights over Harlem.Yeah, so we’re young again, or old,or whatever it is we say when re-grippedby our best, most terrible desires—

And why the hell are we always on the setof some opera every time we’re fallingin or out of love? With a flourish,this is how to remember being twenty-two: lovesickand cold, I’m waiting outside your buildingon a street obliterated by snow.My hands, your hands, and yet it’sthe voices of strangers that cut throughthe one o’clock dark of a dying December.Let’s go wither on that balcony of yourswith its snow-sheathed balustradesand bathe in some Wagner for a change.Why should stillnessalways have to fall over everything?Why not hollow out the dark this time?These, questions for the gods,who know everything, see everything—

While we mortals sit on the sidesof county roads, like bugs,pretending to look at mapsagainst the failing autumn sun.It’s warm and you’re splayed across the hoodof the weathered two-door your papabequeathed you. That shirt, those cutoffs,the endless ribbon of skin around your waist.My arms, my eyes, this helix-strand of highway,this golden waste of wheatfields.Being crushed by desire is a godgreat enough for twenty-one,but the hills and the trees thereseem painted now in watercolor,the landscape swollen with silence.The world ashes its cigarette and asks,was that really it? Everything is forgotten now,and quiet, and equal—

So maybe all I had I lost in a gaspsome summers back. Sun hanging lowin the window again, sumptuous as a tangerine.A pair of heels. A row of eyeliner.A boombox with a broken volume knob.And then, the dark.It’s not so easy to do this again,but on we go, at least to rememberwhat was lostof our better selves—